{"id":48842,"date":"2025-08-08T15:14:24","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T19:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=48842"},"modified":"2026-02-04T17:10:44","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T22:10:44","slug":"separate-icons-for-macos-tahoe-vs-earlier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/08\/separate-icons-for-macos-tahoe-vs-earlier\/","title":{"rendered":"Separate Icons for macOS Tahoe vs. Earlier"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Siracusa<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Looks like Tahoe\/Xcode beta 5 no longer lets me show my pre-Tahoe app icons in pre-Tahoe OSes. This is a bummer. I filed FB19437407 asking for the ability to do this.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

I was also looking into<\/a> how to do this. I had read that you could just keep your old icon in the .xcassets<\/tt> and use the same name for the new .icon<\/tt> file, and it would all just work: new icon on Tahoe and old icon on older versions of macOS. But I found that the old icon didn’t<\/a> make it into the built app, and even the generated .icns<\/tt> file for backwards compatibility was low-resolution.<\/p>\n\n

Avi Drissman<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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By default, yes, actool<\/code> will ignore .xcassets<\/tt> compatibility bitmaps that match the name of your app icon, and will instead substitute its own. However, if you use the super duper secret undocumented --enable-icon-stack-fallback-generation=disabled<\/code> flag, it won’t. See here<\/a>. This worked as of db4; I really hope they didn’t break it in db5.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

This did not<\/a> work for me with beta 5.<\/p>\n\n

Václav Slavík<\/a> found that it does work to separate names for the .iconset<\/tt> (for CFBundleIconFile<\/code>) and .icon<\/tt> (for CFBundleIconName<\/code>), not putting either in .xcassets<\/tt>, and this seemed to work for me, at least with his test project<\/a>. But this approach didn’t work for Siracusa<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Václav Slavík<\/a>:<\/p>\n

There’s apparently something special about app icons stored in Assets.car<\/tt>, it’s not just the name, and that’s what is throwing a wrench into things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n